Monday, December 31, 2012

So says Deepak Jaikishan, the man who appears to know a damaging lot
about a murder mystery and is threatening to tell some or tell all he
knows about it.

But one cannot be sure about his bona fides
because the ‘now you see me, now you don't' businessman seems to have a
taste for expedient disclosure: he dangles tantalising tidbits as bait,
perhaps, for negotiated compromises.

It appeared that one such
pact was negotiated last Friday when he abruptly withdrew a court case
he had filed on grounds that he had been cheated in a land deal.

He emerged with RM30 million as the price for the withdrawal. But he says the sum was meagrecompared to what he could have gained had his interlocutors not reneged on prior commitments.

He had no choice, he said, but to settle for the mere return of the
costs he had initially incurred as the price for the withdrawal of his
court case.

End of story?

No. It looks like the saga of the ‘Deepak Disclosures' is set to continue.

This ‘DD' saga, after flickering twice, once before the Umno general assembly and the second time
after the annual confab, appeared to have guttered out with Friday's
news that a cheating case he had filed was settled out of court.

The trial of the case could have opened up a Pandora's box of incriminating details.

Dramatic twists and turns

No sooner had speculation swirled that the businessman equipped with
what seems to be lethal inside knowledge of the Altantuya Shaariibuu
murder was being bought off with the settlement of his land deal, he
emerges to say that come New Year's Day he will reveal more of what he knows, with some supposedly incriminating documentary evidence in tow.

This
is ominous for personalities within the fire zone. Given what forewent
in past phases of this saga, intimations such as Deepak shed, after the
withdrawal of his case, are the prelude for dramatic twists and turns.

Witness the episode of the two conflicting statutory declarations by private eye P Balasubramaniam in July 2008.

Deepak said he knows quite a lot about the second SD that reversed the
sensational contents of the first. In fact, he is on record as having
facilitated the second SD.

Now he says on Jan 1 he will disclose
details of his and other facilitators' roles in the reversal of
Balasubramaniam's second SD.

There are some 48 hours to go
before the ‘DD' saga resumes, a hiatus in which a lot can happen,
notwithstanding Deepak's claim that he cannot be bought.

But we
know, and he has admitted, that he had helped arrange for
Balasubramaniam's provisional silence after the dramatic reversal of the
investigator's first SD.

The question, in spite of Deepak's
assurances to the contrary, inevitably arises: Will he opt for a
Faustian bargain in reverse?

In the literary legend, Faust sold his soul to the Devil as the price of his acquisition of knowledge.

Could
not Deepak be enticed into silence about what he knows for the lucre of
fulfilled ambition as a real estate magnate that he obviously aspires
to be?Never a dull moment Very
little is known about Deepak the man. Thus far he appears to be a
character from the novels of Graham Greene where the truth of any
situation remains hidden and is riddled with ambiguities.

But
with people like him haunting the corridors of power, is it any wonder
that there is never a dull moment in Malaysian politics.

The
situation is positively hilarious when you have characters like Tengku
Adnan Tengku Mansor, the preternaturally sanguine Umno
secretary-general, who yesterday announced that both the Malaysian
Anti-Corruption Commission and the police have cleared allBN candidates for the parliamentary and state assembly seats at the coming polls.

No doubt the member for Pekan has also had his credentials cleared.

This is not the first, nor will it be the last, time that Tengku Mansor has delivered himself of such fatuities.

Next month it will be five years since he unleashed that classic
explanation for why people used his name as they please: asked by the
royal commission on the Lingam videotape why the lead player in the
drama had mentioned his name in connection with what seemed look a
scandalous attempt at judge-fixing, Tengku Adnan said he has discovered
that people were wont to use his name, even inmates in prison have been
known to do so.

Little wonder some pundits concede that while
the provenance of the saying - ‘May you live in interesting times' - is
assuredly Chinese, its pertinence is decidedly Malaysian.

What
with our political stage peopled with the likes of Deepak and Tengku
Adnan, our times are not just interesting; they can be riveting.
TERENCE
NETTO has been a journalist for close on four decades. He likes the
occupation because it puts him in contact with the eminent without being
under the necessity to admire them. It is the ideal occupation for a
temperament that finds power fascinating and its exercise abhorrent.